Too much and too little.
Army investigators track a deserter into the Venezuelan jungle.
DeMille's last thriller (The Cuban Affair, 2017) successfully incorporated Cuba's precarious internal politics into the plot, and this one—the first he's written with his son Alex—attempts to do the same with Venezuela's faltering existence. Kyle Mercer, a high-value Delta Force soldier, deserted his unit in Afghanistan, was captured by the Taliban, and then escaped his captors. He has been spotted in Venezuela, and Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor, investigators for the Army's Criminal Investigation Division, are dispatched to bring him back to stand trial. This seems straightforward, but there are questions: Why did Mercer desert? Is the U.S. government wholly determined to have him brought back alive? And more immediately and practically, how can the CID team function in the failed state of Venezuela? The situation in Venezuela is painstakingly delineated, but it remains an element of the setting, never rising to the level of a plot device as Cuban political tensions did in the earlier novel; the result is a dreary repetition of the facts of life in Caracas: bribery and violence, violence and bribery. Brodie and Taylor are fortunate to secure the services of Luis, a Venezuelan driver who is a likable but somewhat predictable character, and with his help they are able to discover that Mercer has left Caracas and is now in the jungle in the south. The doughty investigators track him there, learn the ugly truth about his defection and about the real nature of Brendan Worley, the purported attaché in Caracas. There is much to like about this story: Brodie's and Taylor's attempts to avoid a growing attraction; a useful discussion of the legal definition of "desertion"; some of the descriptions of the geography of southern Venezuela; and the reminder of what those in power will do to avoid embarrassment. But the story is too long and lacks dramatic variety, asking over and over the same questions: Where is Mercer? Why did he do it? Who wants him dead rather than alive?
Too much and too little.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0175-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Dean Koontz fans, in particular, will find much to enjoy in this sinister, unsettling treat. Tudor just keeps getting better...
A few years ago, Gabe Forman’s wife, Jenny, and 5-year-old daughter, Izzy, were killed in their home, but Gabe is convinced that Izzy is still alive.
Traversing England’s M1 in a camper van (which doubles as his home) in an endless search for clues to his daughter’s whereabouts is no way to live, but Gabe, who is a shadow of his former self, sees it as penance. During the attack on his family three years ago, Gabe wasn’t home. He was on the M1, where he insists he caught a glimpse of Izzy in an old car. His father-in-law identified their bodies, but Gabe’s sighting of Izzy that day, and a few other things, has convinced him that she’s still alive. He was a suspect for a short time but was cleared and couldn’t convince the police of his sighting. A tip on Izzy from a mysterious man who calls himself the Samaritan leads to a submerged car, a dead body, and an underground network that calls itself The Other People. Its website is only accessible via the dark web, and it offers a very exclusive service for victims of crime who feel robbed of the justice they feel they deserve. But the group's help comes at a terrible price. Meanwhile, a woman named Fran is on the run with a little girl named Alice, who has terrifying visions of a girl and an eerie beachscape. Who is the girl, and what is she trying to tell Alice? Tudor’s (The Hiding Place, 2019, etc.) narrative is saturated in menace, and the action, once it starts, barely lets up. Gabe’s urgency becomes the reader’s as he gets closer to finding out the truth about the horrible day that he lost his family, and Tudor skillfully weaves in poignant observations on the nature of justice and the power of grief. However, while the supernatural storyline is certainly creepy, it could have used a bit more meat on its bones—but that’s a quibble.
Dean Koontz fans, in particular, will find much to enjoy in this sinister, unsettling treat. Tudor just keeps getting better and better.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984824-99-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Even at less-than-peak performance, Mosley delivers enough good stuff to let you know a master’s at work.
If you’ve been wondering what Leonid McGill and his family private-eye business have been up to lately, how does trying to foil a billionaire’s murderous plot to conceal his black heritage sound to you?
The seemingly unstoppable Mosley (John Woman, 2018, etc.) shifts his restless vision back to contemporary New York City and to McGill, the ex-boxer who’s as agile at navigating both sides of the law as he was in the ring. Here, Mosley delves into the murky waters of history and racial identity as Leonid’s agency is asked by one Philip “Catfish” Worry, a 94-year-old African American blues musician from Mississippi, to help him to deliver a letter to the daughter of a wealthy, ruthless, and incorrigibly racist white banker saying that he's her great-grandfather because of an illicit liaison he had with the banker’s white mother. Sounds simple enough, but the aptly named Mr. Worry warns McGill that the banker is desperate enough to do anything within his considerable and far-reaching power to stop that information from getting to his daughter. (“One thing a poor sharecropper understands is that messin’ with rich white people is like tipplin’ poison.”) When his client is wounded three hours after he takes the case, Leonid calls upon every resource available to carry out his assignment, including various characters scattered throughout Manhattan who are somehow beholden to him, whether it’s a physician recovering from opioid addiction or an ill-tempered NYPD captain who dispenses the kind of stern-but-friendly admonitions police detectives have given private eyes since the days of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. Watching McGill coolly deploy the physical and intellectual skills he’d acquired in his previous life as an underworld “fixer” provides the principal pleasure of this installment, along with Mosley’s own way of making prose sound like a tender, funny blues ballad. (At one point he says a character is “as country as a bale of cotton on an unwilling child’s back.”) But there isn’t much more than that to this mystery, which is far less complex than its setup promises.
Even at less-than-peak performance, Mosley delivers enough good stuff to let you know a master’s at work.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-49113-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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